


Homecoming, or Five Times Brad Came Home to Nate

by SylvanWitch



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Domestic Violence, Future Fic, M/M, Major Injury, PTSD, five times fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 07:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/695874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The title pretty much says it all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming, or Five Times Brad Came Home to Nate

**Author's Note:**

> Please be advised that one of these parts is bleak and envisions a not-so-distant future in which DADT is reinstated. One of these parts deals with the correlation between PTSD and domestic violence in relationships in which at least one partner is a combat veteran; the numbers aren't pretty, and the word "epidemic" is not hyperbole. One of these parts deals with a life-altering major injury (paralysis). The other two are positively sunny by comparison. ;-)

He deliberately doesn’t tell anyone when he’s leaving Camp Pendleton after the requisite sixty days.  He keeps quiet about it at the paddle party, makes noises about surfing for awhile.

 

Ray’s not fooled, but he’s no fool either.  He’ll keep Brad’s secret.

 

But though he told no one—not even Nate, _especially_   not Nate—when his flight was getting in at BWI, Nate is there waiting just beyond the security line, hands in his pockets, sheepish grin on his face doing its best not to break out into a giveaway smile.

 

It’s great and terrible to see him.

 

He tries for the backslap, one-armed standard man-hug of the Devil Dogs, but Nate hooks a non-regulation arm around his waist, and Brad is forced to sling one long arm over his shoulders, and he doesn’t hear flashbulbs—because fucking cell phones take silent, damning photos—but he knows this’ll be on the news sooner rather than later.

 

“Relax,” Nate breathes, tightening his fingers around Brad’s waist.  “It’s clear.”

 

And damned if two months out of active duty (he’ll always be a Marine) Brad isn’t already losing situational awareness because it’s only with Nate’s assuring words that he picks out the men and women on their perimeter with ear buds and unread newspapers and five-hundred-yard stares and smiles that manage to say, _Get the fuck away_ , even while they convey, _Nothing to see here_.

 

“You go Fed on me?” he murmurs into Nate’s near ear, gratified to feel Nate shiver at the almost-touch.

 

Nate shakes his head.  “Private security,” he says.  “Kind of what I do.”

 

Brad snorts audibly at the Volvo in the VIP parking garage, refuses to wince as Nate pays the exorbitant gate fee to escape the lot, and lets go a breath he’s been holding for weeks as Nate’s hand comes down on his thigh, solid, warm, and waiting for Brad to call the next move.

 

“Home,” he says, then, and he means the house Nate had picked out before DADT was repealed, a home he’s seen through coded language and in photos with Nate’s pseudo-girlfriend (really his vice president’s sister, Janine, a nice woman with a truly gravity-defying rack) posed throughout the rooms that were supposed to be his and Nate’s.

 

A home he’d come to twice in the last three years, where he’d felt uncomfortably like a guest who got in the way of Nate’s routine.

 

He knows it’s not like that; Nate had told him in so many subtle gestures and a few not-so-subtle ones.  (The blowjob in kitchen when his knees gave out and he cracked his head on the corner of the butcher block table is still one of his favorite how-I-got-this-scar stories, even if he can only share it with three other people).

 

He knows it’s just going to take some adjustment, some integration.  That’s a word the counselor at Pendleton used.  Brad thought at the time it sounded like bullshit, but maybe now he’s seeing the value in learning to fit himself in.

 

The foyer is wide and clean, opening onto a space that soars in a cathedral ceiling with skylights letting in weak grey midwinter light.

 

It’s not really his kind of house, but he appreciates that Nate needs to keep up appearances.

 

“Shoes off or on?” he asks, and Nate gives him a look, maybe startled, turned calculating, and then he’s being shoved into the louvered door of the coat closet and Nate is sucking a hickey into his neck where it joins his shoulder and rubbing a hand over his cock where it’s stirring beneath the denim of his jeans, and Jesus but he missed this.

 

“You can walk around stark naked singing show tunes for all I care,” Nate says over broken breaths as he comes up for air.  “This is our home, Brad, yours and mine,” he asserts, sliding down Brad’s body, undoing his fly, deftly freeing his erection, and swallowing him with no further words.

 

Brad bangs his head against the door, hears the hinge pop, lets out a breathy, completed sound as the heaviness builds in the base of his spine and he comes (too fast, too soon, it’s been too long) down Nate’s throat just as his knees give.

  
“Welcome home,” Nate says a million hours later, applying disinfectant to the cut on Brad’s forehead he’d gotten from the edge of the umbrella stand in the foyer.

 

Brad’s laugh is easy, even if he’s wincing through the eyes at the sting.

 

*****

 

He’d figured that if he could survive PT, he could survive just about anything, but Brad wasn’t counting on the way the raw wood of the ramp stood out in such stark relief against the dark siding of the modest ranch he’d called home on and off for the past three years.

 

Brad can feel Nate waiting patiently behind him, not touching the handles on the chair, knowing this is something Brad wants to do for himself.

 

The staff at Walter Reed had assured him, assured them both, in even tones, with bright, hopeful eyes, that Brad was ready.

 

He’d have said anything to get the fuck out of that hospital room.

 

Now, though, faced with a new kind of evidence of the changes in his life, he’s thinking maybe the familiar, bland four walls of his old room might’ve been okay.

 

As if sensing Brad’s mood, Nate moves around him, Brad’s duffel light against his hip, and moves ahead with confident strides, not looking over his shoulder to see if Brad will follow.

 

He knows Brad will.

 

The ramp is canted at an easy angle and covered in no-slip treads that kick grit up into his gloved palms.  He can feel it working between the leather and his skin, but he lets it go, grateful to have a challenge that he can face unassisted.  The inner door is open, the storm door gone, and the old threshold has been leveled with the top of the ramp.  Still, he’s breathing a little hard when he gets inside.

 

It smells like home; that’s the first thing Brad notices.  The second is Nate standing in the middle of the living room, eyes assessing Brad’s reaction to the interior changes, his usual biding patience there and something else, something that stirs his heart-rate up another notch.

 

“I thought this day would never fucking come,” Nate says, and Brad hears everything: 

 

Nate’s fear when he’d gotten the call about Brad’s victor being hit, his grim determination upon learning (his hand in Brad’s, gripped tight against the disapproving glare of the doctor) that Brad would never walk again, his tireless efforts to renovate their house, to help Brad through therapy, to ensure he was getting his benefits and proper care.

 

They meet in the middle of the room, Nate dropping to a crouch even as Brad’s hands reach for him, cupping his face, careful of the gritty gloves he’s wearing.  Nate ignores what discomfort there is, takes his mouth in a hard, deep, wet kiss that leaves them both panting raggedly when Nate at last pulls away.

 

His mouth is red, face stubble- and grit-burned, and he’s gorgeous, and it comes home to Brad for the first real time that he’ll never fuck that mouth loose and wet, never feel Nate’s lips around his cock, never shove his way into the heat of Nate again.  It leaves him breathless as a gut-punch and reeling, and as if Nate can tell where Brad has gone, he rubs one thumb along Brad’s lower lip, stands up, and uses the other hand to reach for his fly.

 

“Yes,” Brad chokes out, managing to speak around the despair caught in his throat, and helps Nate slide his jeans and boxers down around his thighs.  He hooks an arm around Nate and pulls him close, turning his head to nuzzle the join of thigh and pelvis, brushing his free hand back to cup Nate’s balls, and then takes him into his mouth.  

 

Nate gives a sound between a moan and a sob and rocks into Brad’s mouth, which Brad obligingly opens wider to take him as far as he can.

 

“God, Brad. God, yes, fuck, Brad, God the mouth on you.  Fuck,” Nate breathes, tightening a hand in Brad’s hair.  The angle is hard on Brad’s neck, but he has no trouble holding Nate up, not even when Nate starts to thrust deeper, sliding against the back of Brad’s throat and his knees start to give way as he lets go, crying out and clutching weakly at Brad as Brad gentles him through the last spasms and swallows down every last drop.

 

“You’re really fucking strong,” Nate notes, voice wrecked with pleasure.  Brad’s arm is the only thing keeping Nate on his feet.

 

“We should get a set of parallel bars,” Brad answers, smirking up into Nate’s sweaty face.

 

“Check the garage,” Nate answers, smirking right back.

 

 

*****

 

He’s standing on the tarmac watching the plane be guided in, waiting for its big bay door to open to release its terrible load, when he hears, “Used to be this would be on TV at the end of the national news every night, back in the bad ol’ days of ‘Nam.”

 

Nate clears his throat and nods.  “I know.”

 

“Names along the bottom of the screen as they were unloaded.  Americans safe in their living rooms watching the cost for their so-called freedom from Communism.”

  
Nate doesn’t need a history lesson, but it’s good to hear Ray’s voice.  

 

“How’ve you been?” he asks inanely when the silence becomes too crowded with things they can’t say out loud.

 

“Good, Cap—Senator.  I’ve been good. I’m…”  

 

Nate doesn’t recall Ray ever sounding uncertain about anything in his life, but he sounds unsure of what he says next.

 

“I’m surprised to see you here, sir.”

 

“It’s Nate, Ray.  Just Nate.”

 

“Okay, _Nate_.  You’re taking a pretty big risk, aren’t you?”  
  
Nate finally turns to look at Ray, whose eyes are hidden behind mirrored aviators.  All he can make out are twin images of  himself looking hot and out of place on the sweltering tarmac at Dover.

 

“Why?  Brad was a fellow Marine.”

 

Ray’s snort is scornful.  “Plenty more where he came from.”

 

“Fuck you,” Nate answers succinctly.  “You know why I’m here.”

 

He’s here because he can’t come to the viewing, can’t go to the funeral or to Arlington for the burial, can’t stand beside Brad’s mother and tell her what a wonderful man Brad was.  

 

Because Brad’s mother doesn’t know Nate, had only met him once, in passing, all those years ago when they’d deplaned stateside after OIF.

 

Doesn’t know that Nate’s spent ten years of stolen weekends and lost liberties in backwater locations with questionable amenities and never enough time to hear Brad laugh or feel his big, broad hands on Nate’s back or wrapped around the back of his head or twined around his wrists against the sheets.

 

Spent hours on the Senate floor and days in backroom deals trying to shout down or talk around the Bible-thumping know-nothings who keep forgetting the Constitution in their urge to “save America from abomination.”

 

Spent a full three days refusing to answer his phone or the door when DADT was reinstated after the last big turnover in the House.

 

Spent half an hour on a SAT phone tracking Brad down just to hear his voice when Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Tennessee became the first states in the union to make homosexuality a crime again.

 

“I’m sorry,” Ray says after awhile, like maybe he’s read some of Nate’s thoughts on his face.  Or like the good friend he’s always been.

 

“Me, too,” Nate answers, breath choked in his throat as the gaping bay finally disgorges its flag-draped, shining metal casket.  It looks so small against the brute size of the cargo plane, so small under the flat, unfeeling sky.  

 

Too small to mean the end of everything for Nate.   

 

The honor guard snaps to a salute, white gloves against sweating foreheads, brightly colored medals glinting in the punishing sun, and the band plays _Taps_ at a slow tempo that seems to draw out every agonizing breath between Nate’s seeing the casket and knowing who’s inside of it.

 

Beside him, Ray, too, salutes as the casket passes, though he’s in civvies, having retired years before.

 

Nate stands at attention, hands clenched at his sides, feeling the weight of his secret crushing the breath from his chest and wanting nothing more than to lie down on the hot ground and let it bake the life out of him.

 

“Brad,” he whispers, wishing for so many, many things they’d never had and never will.

 

Beside him, Ray drops his salute and turns away, giving Nate space he can’t use anymore, privacy that means nothing.

 

He wants to howl.

 

Instead, he takes a step and then another, resolutely ignoring the casket as it’s rolled into the hangar, following Ray back to the terminal where guests usually wait for the first sight of their beloved dead.

 

“Come for a drink?” Ray hazards in a tone that says he knows already what Nate’s answer will be.

 

“I have to get back to DC,” Nate says, fulfilling expectations.

  
Ray nods, takes his sunglasses off, gives Nate a considering look.

 

“Will you be alright, Nate?”

 

It’s Nate’s turn to nod, something thick in his throat preventing him from answering.  Sure.  Of course he will.

 

“Of course,” he manages at last.

 

Neither of them mentions the tightness in his voice or the way he can’t look at Ray.

 

“He loved you, sir,” Ray says at last, leaning in close enough that his whisper wafts warm air across Nate’s cheek.

 

He shivers, eyes closing against the feeling and the words, and then nods, a broken motion.

 

“And I love him,” he says aloud, the words meaningless to the strangers around them.

 

 

*****

 

 

It’s the airport parking garage attendant who isn’t moving fast enough for them and then the queue of taxis moving toward the highway on-ramp.

 

It’s a car door slamming in the driveway next door.

 

It’s a plane banking low, engines shifting into a bone-grinding whine as it comes in for a landing.

 

It’s the remote that needs new batteries and there not being enough ground coffee for a full pot.

 

The crack in the garage door window.  A barking dog two streets down.  Kids playing tag at the corner.  The thin tread of the carpet on the fourth stair from the bottom.  The hinge on the linen closet door.  

 

It’s a pizza delivered cold and a pile of junk mail and a hole in his sock and Nate being late— _again_ —from work.

 

It’s a host of stupid shit the in-country Brad Colbert would have weathered with a sarcastic remark or no remark at all but a wry upturn of his lips and a knowledge he communicated with his eyes.  The Iceman indeed.

 

This Brad Colbert is no Iceman.

 

The third time he blows up at Nate over something minor, Nate stands up from where he’s sitting at the kitchen table—or rather, where he’s being loomed over by Brad— and says, “Sit the fuck down or get the fuck out, Colbert.”

 

At his tone—part commanding officer, part disgusted lover—Brad takes a hesitant step backward, face draining of expression, and does as he’s told.

 

He doesn’t come back for three days.

 

When he returns, he’s got circles under his eyes and a sheepish grin that makes Nate’s heart squeeze painfully in his chest.

 

He’d been afraid…

 

But he won’t say that to Brad.

 

“We need help,” he says instead, and Brad nods and agrees, shuffles by where Nate stands in the bedroom door and drops onto the bed, head in hands, elbows on knees, shoulders shaking with a steady vibration only visible because Nate knows him so well.

 

They go to counseling together, and Nate reads everything he can get his hands on, and Brad attends a group session at the VA twice a week.

 

They go to the shooting range, which Nate hates but Brad finds calming, and to the bar Nate favors, which Brad tolerates because it’s got decent draft.

 

Nate doesn’t mention Brad’s two a.m. runs, and Brad overlooks the way worry is etching new lines around Nate’s eyes and the corners of his mouth.

 

The studies give them six months, tops, before they give up on their relationship.

 

 _Fuck the studies_ , Nate says, holding Brad’s hand while they watch the nightly national news.

 

 _Fuck the studies_ , Brad echoes when Nate licks into his mouth to quell the nightmares that shake them both out of sleep.

 

The kids in the street, the neighbor’s car door, the linen closet hinge, the fourth step carpet, spilled milk at breakfast and Brad’s got Nate against the refrigerator, hands bruising his shoulders, shouting into his face about something—about nothing, nothing that matters, nothing that should fucking matter.

 

Nate says, “Sergeant, let me go,” in a cool, lethal voice that drops the temperature in Brad’s veins and in the room.

 

“I’m not afraid of you hurting me,” he says then, standing in the kitchen doorway, shoulders straight, head up, eyes making Brad look at him.

 

 _I’m afraid of you hurting us_ goes unsaid, but it’s clear.

 

It’s five months since he’s been back.

 

Five months.

 

“I’ll take the couch,” he says, and it isn’t his voice, this weary sound, like gears grinding on a fucked up victor.  

 

“Bullshit,” Nate answers.

 

They go to sleep, and Nate refuses to leave space between them, his wrist brushing the back of Brad’s, his breath bringing his shoulder in contact with Brad’s biceps.  Brad flexes just to feel Nate near.

 

They go to a lecture at the VA, and afterwards, they talk to the guy, a former Staff Sergeant with a hat-trick:  Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti.  He tells them it’s normal, what Brad’s going through.

 

_For every day you were over there, everything you heard, everything you saw that wasn’t like home, that’s a day you have to reset.  An experience of normal you have to re-learn._

 

Nate says, “Six months,” and the Staff Sergeant gives them a grim head-shake.  “Fuck the studies,” he says.  “It takes as long as it takes.”

 

Back home, bare foot burned on the threadbare stair tread, kids in the street bouncing a basketball ( _ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk_ ) Brad clenches his fists and breathes, and Nate says, “Behind you.  Coming up,” with a full laundry basket in his hands.

 

Brad moves, follows Nate into their room, folds socks, underwear, tee-shirts.

 

 _I love you_ is obvious in the way Nate smoothes the lines of the shirts, the way he puts Brad’s socks in the drawer in the order Brad prefers, the order Nate used to tease him about.

 

 _Fuck the studies_ , he thinks, taking Nate in his arms, dropping his head to suck in a deep breath of Nate’s scent, to leave an open-mouthed wet mark on the join of his neck and shoulder.

 

Nate says, “I love you,” and Brad hears it, feels it, knows it, breathing out, breathing in, letting his head be soothed by the steady rhythm of Nate’s heart under his spread palm.

 

“I love you,” he says back.

 

It’s been six months three days two hours sixteen minutes since he came home.

 

Fuck the studies.  They are going to do this.

 

*****

 

He’s waiting at the airport in a crowd of mostly women and children, a few dads and brothers thrown in, whoever could get free at midday on a Tuesday, whoever could afford to drive or fly to California to see them arrive.

 

He’s standing next to a woman who’s got a squirming toddler in her arms, and he’s talking to the kid, his eyes bright, lips wide in a goofy smile, making signals with his fingers to keep the kid’s attention.

 

Brad’s pretty sure Nate’s signaling for heavy ASS support, but the kid doesn’t know it.

 

Espera breaks rank first, jogging toward his wife and little girl, and Trombley surprises them all with a rebel yell as he races toward a tiny little blonde thing with a squalling, red-faced baby in her arms.

 

Brad hangs back, watching the reunions, watching Nate watch the reunions, until Nate’s eyes find his and everything stops.

  
It’s stupid, a fucking cliché, but that’s what it feels like:  The muted roar of joyous greetings, the laughing, crying, shouting, back-slapping; the squealing babies and over-excited kids; hell, the barking of a dog or two.  All of it fades, and it’s just Brad moving across the tarmac toward Nate, who’s an island of calm in a sea of frantic embraces and sweaty, overjoyed faces.

 

“Kiss the boy, homes,” Poke crows.

 

“Oh, Nate,” Ray croons in falsetto, “It’s been so long, baby.  I neeeed you.”

 

Nate maintains his stern, Captain’s expression, but there’s that tell of his, a miniscule upward quirk that Brad knows by heart, and then Brad’s standing in front of him, the toes of his boots to the tips of Nate’s shoe, and they’re looking at each other like they might not have another chance, and then one or both move at the same time, and they’re kissing to a chorus of lewd suggestions and sentimental sounds, like they’ve just gotten caught making out in the locker room during a junior high dance.

 

Nate laughs into the kiss, and Brad takes advantage for a strategic assault, plunging his tongue into Nate’s mouth, feeling an approving moan coming up through Nate’s body, which is flush with his own.

 

When they break away, there’s a cacophony of noise, chaos and backslaps, handshakes and “I’ve heard so much about yous.”  Brad wants to take Nate somewhere private and quiet and get him naked slowly, revealing each inch of skin, relearning all of the places that make him shift and writhe.

 

Instead, of course, there are obligatory things requiring his immediate attention.

 

For now, Brad settles for looping his arm around Nate’s neck and hauling him close to his side, Nate’s arm coming up around his waist to keep him close.

 

“It’s good to be home,” Brad says, planting a kiss on Nate’s temple.

 

“I love you,” Nate answers.

 

Ray says, “Get a room!”


End file.
